The concept of profession explains why approximately 60 percent of Air Force general officers are still pilots when pilots comprise not quite 20 percent of the officer corps. The percentage of Air Force general officers who are pilots declined from 88 percent in FY1948 to 63 percent in FY2003. Over the same period, the percentage of total Air Force officers who are pilots decreased from 50 to 19 percent. This presents a two-sided puzzle. Standard bureaucratic politics theory does not explain why a group with a monopoly on organizational political power (pilots) would relinquish power and why pilots are still overrepresented in the general officer ranks. The answer to the puzzle lies in the Air Force officer corps' self-identification as a profession. That profession develops new fields of expertise in order to maintain its relevancy in the face of the changing character and nature of warfare, and the officer corps' composition changes as its expertise changes. The primary motivations for these changes are the responsibilities inherent in the profession's contract with society. Society awards jurisdiction over a specific competency to one or more professions. The combination of responsibility and jurisdictional competition resulted in pilot general officers making choices that led to an Air Force in which the locus of decision-making is evolving out of the cockpit and into the command and control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) system. However, pilots remain overrepresented in the general officer ranks because of past structural factors that stem largely from strategies that the Air Force officer corps' employed in its struggle to establish itself as a profession independent of the Army officer corps. In fact, these enduring structural factors have masked the dramatic changes in the Air Force officer corps' expertise, composition, and perhaps, jurisdiction.

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